Coinbase CEO Says Crypto Will Become More Important in AI Era, Pushes ‘Agentic Finance’

Cryptocurrencies will play a bigger role as the artificial intelligence industry expands, according to Coinbase Chief Executive Officer Brian Armstrong.

In a post on X on July 26, Armstrong pushed back on the idea that people in crypto should pivot to AI. He wrote that AI’s rise as a megatrend does not make crypto less important and instead makes it more important.

Armstrong compared crypto to general-purpose infrastructure such as electricity and the internet. Rather than competing with new technologies, he said, it serves as a foundation that supports their growth.

He also said AI agents will eventually emerge as independent economic actors that can hold funds and transact on their own. AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure and will ultimately conduct far more transactions each day than all humans combined, he wrote. They cannot open bank accounts or wait three days for transfers.

For that reason, Armstrong said real-time programmable money will become core financial infrastructure for AI agents. He said AI agents will be able to hold funds directly, pay for goods and services, carry out transactions and financial advisory functions, and raise and borrow capital for new projects.

Armstrong added that AI agents will eventually take over personal finance tasks such as tax planning, portfolio rebalancing and bill payments.

Coinbase has defined the combination of AI and crypto as "Agentic Finance," or AiFi, and is building infrastructure for it. Armstrong said Coinbase's x402 protocol, the Base network and the dollar stablecoin USDC are currently handling most AI agent payments. "Welcome to the world of agentic finance," he wrote. "This is what Coinbase is building."